Paul Scheffer is a leading figure in the reaction against the “immigrationist” narrative of liberal Europe – that we have always been mongrel nations and that mass immigration is a desirable, and unavoidable, enrichment of our grey and ageing societies.

But he is no reactionary. His critique is based on social-democratic anxieties about the future of mutual obligation and how we have not asked enough of new citizens in increasingly fragmented European societies. As a member of the Dutch Labour party, he published a famous essay in 2000 attacking multiculturalism, opening a debate that came to be dominated by anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim populists.

Many chapters can be read as stand-alone essays – on cosmopolitanism, on contrasts between the big European countries, on the Netherlands story. But there are also some big themes that weave through the book: how immigration represents loss and alienation for everyone concerned and how conflict can be a step on the road to accommodation; how integration has become harder thanks to welfare practices and transnational identities (especially Islamic ones) that make it easier not to join the host society; how European and American immigration has more in common than we assume; and how the embrace of “diversity” has nurtured conservatism in immigrant cultures struggling to adapt to western freedoms.”